"We live in a deeply troubled and profoundly unsettled time. Drugs and crime, campus revolts, racial discord, draft resistance--on every hand we find old standards violated, old values discarded, old precepts ignored. A vocal minority of our young people are opting out of the process by which a civilization maintains its continuity: the passing on of values from one generation to the next. Old and young across the Nation shout across a chasm of misunderstanding, and the louder they shout, the broader the chasm becomes. As a result of all this, our institutions in America today are undergoing what may be the severest challenge of our history. I do not speak of the physical challenge, the force and threats of force that have racked our cities and now our colleges. Force can be contained. We have the power to strike back if need be, and we can prevail. The Nation has survived other attempts at insurrection. We can survive this one. It has not been a lack of civil power, but the reluctance of a free people to employ it, that so often has stayed the hand of authorities faced with confrontation. But the challenge I speak of today is deeper--the challenge to our values and to the moral base of the authority that sustains those values. At the outset, let me draw a very clear distinction. A great deal of today's debate about "values," or about "morality," centers on what essentially are private values and personal codes: patterns of dress and appearance, sexual mores, religious practices, the uses to which a person intends to put his own life. Now these are immensely important, but they are not the values I mean to discuss here today. My concern and our concern today is not with the length of a person's hair, but with his conduct in relation to the community; not with what he wears, but with his impact on the process by which a free society governs itself. I speak not of private morality, but of public morality--and of "morality" in its broadest sense, as a set of standards by which the community chooses to judge itself."
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Presidents of the United StatesPoliticians from CaliforniaQuakersUnited States presidential candidates, 1972United States presidential candidates, 1968
Original Language: English
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Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (9 January 1913 – 22 April 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974, when he became the only president to resign the office. Nixon had previously served as a Republican U.S. representative and senator from California from 1947 to 1952 and as the 36th vice president of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
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